I see a French fishing village. A sky of
azure hangs above. A thousand people bustle below. The sun beams on the
boulevards; the town twinkles. And a Riviera runs through it.

Even if you didn’t grow up fishing for
films at Cannes, after 20 years you feel as if you did. You feel like the
Brad Pitt of some Robert Redford-directed idyll about sparkling waters and
the nourishing, leaping, silvered memories that shaped your
growing up.

“Son,” you say to anyone polite enough to
listen, “I was here when Jean Cocteau sauntered through looking for some
fly-fishing. I was here when the Hole in the Zeitgeist Gang rode in, led by Franky Truffaut and Johnny ‘Luke’ Godard, looking for
trouble and revolution. I was even here in 2010” – you will
say in 2050 – “when there was an outbreak of films that swam upstream and
everyone tried to catch a few. It was known, son, as the Year of the Salmon.”

Well, it should have been. How else do
you categorise the 63rd Cannes Film Festival, weird and wondrous,
where every competition pic seemed made against the current? Only the
currents differed, and the directors’ reasons for swimming against them. We
started on gala opening night with ROBIN HOOD, Ridley Scott’s revisionist
romp about the man in tights, attempting to prove that Robin Hood (actually
Robin Longstride) didn’t wear any tights – he
didn’t even wear green or live in a wood – and that Maid Marian (actually
Lady Marian) was a married woman.

Follow that? Cannes did with Bertrand
Tavernier’s THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER, a counter-current costumer,
crackling with passion, from the French craftsman of quiet contempo dramas (A WEEK’S VACATION). Then came Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s
BIUTIFUL, swimming against the flow of his previous multi-plot output (BABEL
and Co) with the intimately focused portrait of a dying street gypsy (Javier Bardem). Then – best and most defiant of all – there was
Mike Leigh’s ANOTHER YEAR, a cine-salmon so strong it out-muscled all
contenders in making for the head of the river.

This is the finest film yet from the
British helmer, previously Golden Palmed for
SECRETS AND LIES. Leigh’s way of reversing the practice of a lifetime – and
our expectations – is to multiply his plots and characters. No Leigh critic
can say of ANOTHER YEAR, as of some past movies (including his last,
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY), “Oh he takes a little bunch of interlinked neurotics and mannerises them to death.”

Here the main characters, plainly yet
compellingly played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen, are not mannered at all.
They’re a greenish couple sustaining themselves in exurban London (with
allotment garden for homegrown vegetables) whose
weirdest tic is to hold open house for friends and family. These do include a
few recognizable Leigh oddballs: the middle-aged, overweight loner (Peter
Wight), hooked on oral solaces (eating, drinking, chain-smoking), who vainly
pursues the aging, chattering, insecure party girl (Leigh veteran Lesley
Manville), who in turn has an unrequited yen for the host couple’s son, a sly
extrovert with his own amatory secrets (Oliver Maltman).

Just when we think we’ll be staying with
this lot till the film’s end crawl, the filmmaker ups sticks and moves to a
northern-England funeral. A widowered relative
(David Bradley) takes centre screen. His violent, disaffected son blows a
brief hole in the protocol of mood-and-plot unity. The film’s rhythm becomes
at once brilliantly uneasy and menacingly becalmed. Then, just like the
seasons that cyclically chapter-head the story’s
sections (‘Spring’, ‘Summer’ and so on) we wind back to beginnings, after the
long year’s journey into bleak and comical enlightenment.

The movie is utterly beguiling. Chekhov
in Limeyland. Its mastery lies in the connection
made between different styles of characterisation. Manville’s social
butterfly, with her semi-broken wings and toujoursgai nerve reflexes, is a type known
from past Leigh dramas, starting with Alison Steadman in ABIGAIL’S PARTY. But
actress and director here add extra innerness, extra nuancing, sometimes in a
mere wordless glance. By the time the most touching scene arrives – a
meeting-quaint between Manville and Bradley, home-alone as a house guest down
south while his hosts Broadbent and Sheen are out – it becomes a triumphant
entente between opposites. Not just between the manic would-be cosmopolite
and the dour lump of northern rock-salt; but between the tics-and-tropes
style of portraiture, suddenly made human, and the minimal realist style,
given (by Leigh and actor Bradley) just that extra wit, forwardness and
vividness.

From the other side of the world, in the
Year of the Salmon, came the competition’s two other big fish. A brace of
eerily memorable Asian movies, their images as fluid and their spell as
fugitive as their alluvial settings. A river runs through one film; a
waterfall and magical pool are at the heart of the other.

Lee Changdong’s
POETRY from South Korea gave a whale of a part – never mind smaller aquatic lifeforms – to Yun Junghee,
playing a granny bringing up a teenage brat suspected of gang-rape
activities. He’s only a schoolkid, but a girl has
killed herself: we see her float downstream in scene one. Grandma is a
touching biddy, still holding out for refinement (pastel-print jackets,
lace-style white scarves) as Alzheimer’s Disease moves in and amour-propre
starts to move out. The palsied old man she works for, as maid and carer, wants
more for his money at bathtime than just a back
rub.

The old girl goes to poetry classes:
she’ll transcend her life if it kills her. But what to do about
grandson?Director Changdong,
who made the superb SECRET SUNSHINE, a Cannes hit two years ago, again zones
in on bereavement, vulnerability, age and the ambivalent motives of those who
‘care’. In the earlier film it was a creepy religious sect. Here the fathers
of the gang-rape boys band together, and recruit Grandma, to appease and buy
off the dead girl’s parent. Will Gran blow the whistle? Will Gran even shop
her own brat to the cops? The bewitching delta of story trajectories – even
though we know they will all end and merge, beyond the film’s own completion,
in the sea of death – are magically conjoined in the source character. Old
age is no respecter of the quest for tranquillity; at least while life lasts
and the heart, mind and soul are open to fresh truths and challenges.

From Thailand comes ApichatpongWeerasethakul’s UNCLE BONMEE RECALLS HIS PAST
LIVES. This poet of the Asian screen made the haunting, fantastical TROPICAL
MALADY, another Cannes revelation in its year, and now re-summons that
movie’s jungle imagery and ghostly supporting cast. The ‘Uncle’, tended by
his small family, is dying of kidney disease – his belly in bedroom scenes a
spaghetti junction of tubes siphoning off effluvia – while his mind is
swirled about, no less convolutedly, by spirits and essences that become more
visible, more tangible as the tale progresses.

A dead sister materialises at the meal
table. A son who mated with a ghost monkey returns as, yes, a ghost monkey.
(Loved the two red eyes burning out of the dark Chewbacca fur). Soon we watch
as the main characters, dead and alive, troop into deeper caverns of storytelling,
journeying Jules Verne-like to the centre of their spiritual or karmic
selves. Jungles, caverns; a waterfall at whose foot – a fairytale
within fairytale – a princess is ravished by a
catfish. By the last scene, in whichtwo key characters or their avatars part from their bodies to go off
for a Thai restaurant dinner (sic) while their source selves stay home to
watch TV....Well, by that time you are either in seventh heaven or in the
seventh circle of Incomprehension Hell.

Weerasethakul freely admits it helps to
have been born a Buddhist. In Thailand transmigration of souls – people
turning into animals – is part of the normal traffic of thought, even if not
of belief. But what sentient westerner
can resist the spooky spell and eerie flow of this film’s phantasmagoria?
What clinches UNCLE BONMEE as poetry – screen poetry – is its very
matter-of-factness. The beauties are entranced and entrancing, yet they are
spoken not sung. They issue from the same daily life, the same marketplace of
the mundane, as the family meal, the evening at home, the visit to the
restaurant, the tragic but universal domestic rites
of the terminal disease…

It is easy to believe in transmigration
and metamorphosis at Cannes. Step out of your darkened cinema, and the Croisette – the palm-sentinelled beachfront boulevard –
is a 24:7 wonderland, even in years when Tim ALICE
IN WONDERLAND Burton is not president of the jury.

A man dressed as an 18th
century dandy dandles two dancing cats on his shoulders. A
troupe of breakdancers perform their
upside-down gyrings and gimblings.
The town’s sand-sculptor finishes his latest Neptune or recumbent mermaid.
(This year he gave us Batman too). A gaggle of zombies, in a promo stunt for
the latest living-dead romp, stagger towards you, one carrying his head under
his arm. And just occasionally there’s a plain and simple celebrity. Ooh
look, there’s Oliver Stone (squiring WALL STREET 2) or Cate Blanchett, looking fresh for the fight as France gets its
first glimpse of ROBIN DU BOIS.

Ah Cannes. If you didn’t exist, the world
would have to invent you. But didn’t the world invent you anyway? All your
accretions and accessories, at least, of culture and razzmatazz, of picture
premieres and partying. The last two are usually reserved for the dark hours,
not that Cannes is ever really dark. Lit by the jewelled wattage of the
Mediterranean sky – even the seagulls are luminous at night – the town
answers the stars with its own billion points of light. The midnight streets explode with
glamour and gaudiness. The gigs on the beach begin. Then, after the long dose
of hedonism and a night to sleep it off, we troop back into the cinemas,
first thing next morning, to suffer for art.

The host nation does its best to mortify
us. And itself. Two competition films addressed the agonized history that is
north-west Africa. To former colonists this is still, it seems, an unhealed
abscess. Xavier Beauvois’s OF GODS AND MEN
powerfully imagines the human drama underlying a true story: the deaths of a
group of monks in Algeria, 15 years ago, when Islamic terrorists raided their
monastery and led them off to presumed slaughter. A sober, even sombre, mise-en-scene paints their devotional lives in shades of
grey while allowing the actors’ humanity – Lambert Wilson as Father Superior,
Michael Lonsdale as the elderly friar running the missionary clinic – to
touch in life-giving flesh tones. The ending is shocking, though even here
the film sustains a reverential distance, reverencing not God but those who
bravely, even when blindly, serve him. As they hymn their defiance, who is
not reminded of the tolling close of Poulenc’s opera DIALOGUES OF THE
CARMELITES, the prayerful music of the martyrs rising against the grisly
punctuation of their deaths?

Flashier and more of an intended
flashpoint was RachidBouchareb’s
HORS LA LOI (OUTSIDE THE LAW). Debate raged in the French press before the
screening. The screening itself was a high-security
gig worthier of an airport: bags searched, bottles impounded, bodies frisked.
No bomb went off, unless you count the movie itself. Bouchareb,
whose last celluloid explosion was INDIGENES (DAYS OF GLORY), about the
ill-treatment of foreign-born French soldiers in World War Two, tells the
history of the FLN, the Algerian resistance movement. The lives of three
brothers (played by the earlier film’s stars JamelDebbouze, RoschdyZem, SamyBouajila)
split apart, then come together, as the flames of anti-colonialism rage. The
fictive story is a little corny, big with contrivance and tragic irony as it
strides across the years. (Mix in your imagination Pontecorvo’s
BATTLE OF ALGIERS and Victor Hugo’s LES MISERABLES). But the cold water of
reality – murder, torture, betrayal – is thrown in our faces often enough to
keep us alert and wired and discomforted.

France also chipped in with THE PRINCESS
OF MONTPENSIER and TOURNEE (ON TOUR). The first is a vivid costumer from
Bertrand Tavernier, a director we had feared lost after his last film, the
US-made IN THE ELECTRIC MIST, a slab of loony southern gothic starring Tommy
Lee Jones. PRINCESS is set in 17th century France and based a
novel by Madame de La Fayette. It skitters stylishly through war, love, royal
politics and fine-turned dialogue. Definitely one for world arthouse distribution. TOURNEE, for contrast, is the tale
of a burlesque troupe managed by Mathieu Amalric
(also the film’s director), who does tousled sleaze to a T and an S. This
charismatic scuzzball could be Archie Rice from THE
ENTERTAINER crossed with Charles Aznavour in SHOOT
THE PIANIST. Minor, but fun. And lots of gratuitous nudity.

French too, at least in language, was MahametSaleh-Haroun’s UN HOMME
QUI CRIE (A SCREAMING MAN) from Chad. The ABOUNA director deploys a dark,
poignant palette in portraying his strife-torn country. Here is the tale of a
tragic father, guilt-racked after sending his son (and work colleague) into
the army, partly to preserve his own job as a pool attendant in a tourist
hotel making economies. Horrors start to happen. Grief rains down the screen,
slow and ineluctable, like dirty rain. The ending – a bleak rhyme with the
happier opening scene of father and son enjoying a breath-holding contest in
the out-of-hours pool – is simple, laconic, devastating.

There was not much you could call
‘escapism’ at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival. Takeshi Kitano took
time off from his serious self to make OUTRAGE, a Yakuza thriller. But the
violence is so extreme – finger-loppings, a
gruesomely novel decapitation – that two hours in Japanese gangland are
hardly recreational. FAIR GAME was Hollywood’s bid to lighten the tone. But
even with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn adding lustre, the true tale of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame and her persecuted husband
Joe Wilson – who made the mistake of providing Bush and Co with WMD-doubting intelligence
before the Iraq invasion – is a shock to the system, assuming your system
doesn’t know the story already. Plame and Wilson suffered badly at the time.
But both were in Cannes, smiling for the paparazzi. So for now at least, they
live ‘happily ever after’. And Bush is back in Texas.

The film you approached with least
expectation of escapism was CristiPiuiu’s AURORA. Puiu made the
grimly brilliant DEATH OF MR LAZARESCU. Here he was, at it again, we hoped,
with a 3-hour film about a divorced man (played by the director), plagued by
society and himself, who takes to murder. Yummy: there would be lots of
Romanian schadenfreude,
bitter comedy, social satire. And it’s only two
years since Romania won the Golden Palm (CristiMungiu’s FOUR MONTHS, THREE WEEKS, TWO DAYS).

Sorry, we’re all out of schadenfreude. And the rest of the shopping list.
AURORA limps at a slow pace, going nowhere while accumulating a great deal of
useless detail. You can learn how to re-plaster a house. In some scenes you
can almost literally watch paint dry. What a letdown.
Still, Puiu is making four more films in this
series. Keep hope alive.

AURORA showed noncompetitively in Un
Certain Regard, the main sideshow at Cannes. This year’s programme was topped
and tailed by Portugal and South Korea. The last film shown, Korea’s HAHAHA,
also won the event’s top gong, the Prix Un Certain Regard. (For ‘noncompetitive’ read ‘oh all right, a bit competitive’).
This award was Greek to me, never mind Korean: Hang Sangsoo’s
film is a fey, logorrheic romcom hard to sit
through for two reels, never mind two hours.

But the Portuguese opener. Ah Manoel. Ah Dolly. Yes, it’s the Manoel
De Oliveira show again. Now 101, the prolix Iberian remains spry enough to
take a Cannes bow, never mind to make a feature, THE STRANGE CASE OF
ANGELICA. This is like some divine coition between Hitchcock and Borges. A
young photographer (Dolly regular Ricardo Trepa)
falls in love with the face of a dead girl he is asked to lens-immortalise in
her coffin. She ‘comes alive’ in her photographs. The photographer’s halo of
otherworldly joy starts to disturb his boarding-house colleagues, a typical
bunch of De Oliveira gossips and meal-table philosophers. Then there is his
weird compulsion to watch, photograph and tape-record the singing diggers on
the vine terraces of the opposite hill…..

It’s a film about past, present, future;
about nostalgia for what was and ‘nostalgia’ for what cannot be; about speech
and song as differently terraced states of being; about the dimension between
sentient life and prescient life-before-death, which an artist of 101 is
qualified, like no other, to know and address. We say ‘like no other’. But in
a year’s time De Oliveira will be 102: better qualified still. And ready, no
doubt, with his next billet-doux from the near-beyond.

So to the prizes. The spotlights waved,
the fanfares sounded. The fireworks worked. The women in designer dresses and
the men in penguin suits climbed the red carpet. The subsidiary prizes, read
out by jury prez Tim Burton (wearing geek chic
specs and hair coiffed in the dragged-through-a-hedge-backwards style) and
his crew, were as follows in ascending order.

Jury Prize to Chad’s THE SCREAMING MAN.
Best Screenplay to Korea’s Lee Changdong for
POETRY. Best Director to Mathieu Amalric. (Bit of a
surprise, but it’s a Gallic fest). Best Actor shared by Spain’s Javier Bardem (BIUTIFUL) and Italy’s ElioGermano (LA NOSTRA VITA). Best Actress to Juliette Binoche (for her incandescent performance in Kiarostami’s CERTIFIED COPY). Grand Jury Prize to Xavier Beauvois’s OF GODS AND MEN.

Finally the Golden Palm. Bent by winds of
acclaim, combed by breezes of beatification, the palm bowed with generous
reach towards Thailand. Yes. It was ApichatpongWeerasethakul’s UNCLE BOONMEE WHO RECALLS HIS PAST LIVES.
Mr A-Pong thanked the gods and spirits of his native land. We thanked the
gods and spirits of Cannes – those topless deities that hover over the Croisette with tans and Dior sunglasses – for the
privilege of having seen the film and witnessed its apotheosis.

Yes, miracles can happen. A final one
occurred on my plane home. The Catholic priest-critic colleague who once
accosted this writer, when peering penniless-seeming and roughly dressed into
a Cannes shop window, and promised him alms, finally – after many years –
handed them over. As the Euro cent changed hands (roughly the value of one US
cent), the angels in heaven cheered and applauded.And I was at peace.

It wasn’t a Palme d’Or, but it was an Alm de Cuivre (copper). This
priest friend is now saved. He is able, when he departs the Vatican on his
final pilgrimage, to tell St Peter: “I gave him the moolah.”
St Peter, the patron saint of bouncers and doormen, can say: “In you go,
then. And the drinks are free after the first one.”

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR
CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.